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That's basically the experience everyone has to go through with any new codebase.

For example, when I worked on a couple Firefox bugs a few years ago, I hadn't touch C++ for several years. I did have to spend several hours just to get a hang of things. Luckily what I needed to change was not too challenging. Several dozen lines were added and overall the necessary functions were all . hg grep helped a lot to find what I want. If I were to implement a new driver from scratch, that would be really tough.

Though since C and C++ aren't something I am very comfortable with (I haven't written a single line of and C and C++ for so long), it can be really tough especially during debugging.




> That's basically the experience everyone has to go through with any new codebase.

Yes; for a codebase of comparable size and widespread usage, the Linux kernel is very, very easy to get into and very, very well documented. Go to Documentation/[your subsystem] and you'll get something useful, usually a reference on a driver you can base yours on (which is how practically all drivers are created).

Nice ways to get started:

- simple character device

- SPI slave and SPI protocol driver




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